The army, in particular, is overstretched, and the navy is being forced to reduce the battle-readiness of some ships to concentrate men and equipment in those on front-line duty.

ECONOMIST: Britain's military power

Currently the data center portion of the total energy consumed in developed countries is in the neighborhood of 2-3% but the rapid pace of on-line equipment growth will drive this to 10% or higher in a few years time.

FORBES: Nothing Comes for Free

Cisco's gateway, which underwent a trial in Honolulu, functions similarly but is more hardware-based, complementing its line of network routing equipment and voice-over-IP telephony.

FORBES: Crisis Communicating

In order to check the audio-visual equipment I arrived an hour early, only to see a line of people already standing outside the auditorium.

FORBES: Body Language for Global Business

On-line data centers are increasing their capacity to deal with this increased demand for processing power, communication speeds and digital storage capacity but despite the increases in efficiency of enterprise equipment and software there is a price to pay for universal connectivity and general on-line resources.

FORBES: Nothing Comes for Free